Mobile data transmission and data services are constantly making progress, wherein such services provide various communication services, such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. In recent years, Long Term Evolution LTE™ has been specified, which uses the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network E-UTRAN as radio communication architecture according to 3GPP specification.
Today's mobile networks consist of dedicated nodes providing telecommunication services to end users. However, recently Network Function Virtualization NFV and Software Defined Network SDN solutions attract more and more the focus of network providers.
As is discussed e.g. in the ETSI NFV white paper (https://portal.etsi.org/nfv/nfv_white_paper.pdf), cloud infrastructures provide methods to enhance resource availability and usage by means of orchestration and management mechanisms, applicable to the automatic instantiation of virtual appliances in the network, to the management of resources by assigning virtual appliances to the correct CPU core, memory and interfaces, to the re-initialization of failed virtual machines (VM), to snapshot VM states and the migration of VMs.
At the core of these cloud technologies are virtualization mechanisms: hardware virtualization by means of hypervisors, as well as the usage of virtual Ethernet switches for connecting traffic between virtual machines and physical interfaces. For communication-oriented functions, high-performance packet processing is available through high-speed multi-core CPUs with high I/O bandwidth, the use of smart Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs) for load sharing and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Offloading, and routing packets directly to Virtual Machine memory, and poll-mode Ethernet drivers.
Generally, the NFV architecture requires that at least the user plane traffic is forwarded from the network to a data center DC, and after processing the packets are forwarded back to the network for further routing.
At the end, this leads to the fact that each virtualized function being placed in the DC creates a doubling traffic from the network router to the DC where the virtualized network function resides, and back to the network router, which creates significant costs for the operator.
Additionally, without intelligent network routing and application allocation the cost for the operator may also increase, which is not desired.
For instance, in case the evolved NodeB eNB (base station), serving gateway SGW and packet gateway PGW are virtualized in three different data centers DC, e.g. the user plane traffic is duplicated three times, i.e. every time for eNB, SGW and PGW separately.
However, for Software Defined Networks SDN this is not the case as the User plane traffic does not necessarily need to be carried to the DC.
Hence, an optimization of the interconnection between legacy nodes and future network architectures and even between future network architectures is required.